Andrew Goldberg is part of an international team studying night blindness

Science often progresses by the effort of a large team of scientists collaborating on an important project. CBR member Andrew Goldberg, of the Eye Research Institute, is a member of an international team of researchers who discovered that GPR179 Is Required for Depolarizing Bipolar Cell Function and Is Mutated in Autosomal-Recessive Complete Congenital Stationary Night Blindness (American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 90, Pages 331-339). Collaborators include researchers in the Netherlands and Canada, as well as those from several institutions in the United States. GPR179 is a gene that encodes for the G-protein coupled receptor 179. Mutations of this gene are thought to play a role in complete congenital stationary night blindness. The report concludes that “GPR179 plays a critical role in DBC [depolarizing bipolar cell] signal transduction and expands our understanding of the mechanisms that mediate normal rod vision”

The research was supported in part by a grant to Goldberg from the National Eye Institute, one of the National Institutes of Health.